Sunday, April 01, 2007

Built on Pit: an all Italian speculation




Just 3 or 4 weeks ago, impressive pictures of the Guatemala City Abyss (above) were published on several newspapers.
At the time, I chose not to publish those and took if for what they really represented. Unfortunately, Guatemala is a not yet a country where, before building common houses, you make geological surveys!
Plus, given the dimensions of the abyss, it really seems a major system went down.

Two days ago i found instead other pics. Of Gallipoli's 'abyss', 10 km northern of my home town, 70 km northern from the very end of the country, south eastern heel of Italy.
Oops!
Italy is a country where you make geological checks before building, isn't it?! but sometimes, like in this particular case, choices (read corruption) make you voluntarily ignore the evidence.
The entire area interested by the phenomenon is built right at the edge of old pits now covered (we did not even need any technical survey, common sense would tell you it's not really safe to build at the perimeter of a big hole!). This is not an abyss: we know it can reach the max depth of 20mt (how deep the pits were) and is growing, dragging the condos above. The hole that opened with a 12 mt diameter by 6mt depth, was already at 20mt diameter yesterday, after 24h.
All another portrait of the BelPaese!